The Media Project is a network of mainstream journalists who are Christians pursuing accurate and intellectually honest reporting on all aspects of culture, particularly the role of religion in public life in all corners of the world. It welcomes friends from other faiths to such discussions and training.

Dec 9

Dec 9 American Politics & People of Faith (speech summary)

The
American press corps is ignorant of religious faith and sees it as
bizarre and irrelevant to public life, said former Senator Rick
Santorum in a speech to the The Media Project’s course on
religion and politics in Washington, DC.

The press proved its
ignorance to Santorum when TIME Magazine named
him, an outspoken Catholic Christian, to its list of “Most
Influential Evangelicals” in 2005.

“The idea of TIME Magazine naming me one of the top-25
evangelicals was sort of funny, if it wasn’t so pathetic that they
don’t even understand what they’re talking about,” Santorum said.

Santorum
had a contentious relationship with the news media during his public
service from 1990-2007, especially the media from his home state of
Pennsylvania. He attributes this tension to his unwillingness to check
his religious influences “at the door” of his office, a choice the
press did not understand or respect.

Though some of the bad
treatment resulted from simple ignorance, much of it came from the
anti-religious bias of the press, said Santorum, who now practices law
in Washington, D.C., and is a fellow with the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

Ironically,
the press treated him and other traditional believers in politics
badly, he said, because the press has its own religion of
non-religion. The news media’s core belief is that religion is
illegitimate in public life.

“I'm controversial because I'm a
believer,” Santorum said. “I stand up and say what I think is dictated
by faith and reason and the traditions of America and the
Judeo-Christian worldview that I hold. And that is very dangerous in
this world. It's seen by the media as dangerous. It's backward.”

The
bottom line for Santorum is that the press is dogmatic about religion
because traditional Christianity has a lot to say about how people
behave in their private lives.

“It comes down to freedom, and it
comes down to sex,” he said. “If you have anything to do with any of
the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do
all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy.”

Years
of top-down cultural change imposed by elitist institutions, especially
academia, has created the modern media’s shortcomings, Santorum says.
But it wasn’t always this way.

Reporters trained at increasingly
liberal and secular universities lost touch with traditional Americans
decades ago, he insisted, and the same trends affected popular culture.

“If you go back 50 years, I don't think you would find that in
the mainstream media. You certainly wouldn't find that in Hollywood,”
said Santorum. “Hollywood was not a seedbed of radical thought in
trying to transform the culture. The mainstream media was much more in
touch with traditional American values.”

The outcome is a culture going through a violent change as views on sex and traditional religion get marginalized, he said.

Santorum
is not hopeful that the media will resolve its problems with believers
in politics any time soon. In fact, he expects the situation to get
worse.

He described his experience with a reporter from his
longtime nemesis the Philadelphia
Inquirer. She came to cover him in the days
coming up to the election in 2006.

“She told me how she went
in there with the attitude that I was the worst, that I was Satan,”
Santorum recounted. “And on election night when I lost, she cried.”